Here is something kind of neat: Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman sitting down with NBC’s Press:Here to talk about video game violence and game ratings. Hartsman came on the program in response to the US administration’s claims that video games are too violent and one of the causes of school violence.

“There are contraindicators of video game play and actual real-world committing violence,” Hartsman said. “I think that at the end of the day, studying actual facts will lead us in a much better direction.”

Other members of the panel said that this is a small distraction for the White House and that it will quickly move on from using video games as a scapegoat for recent school shootings.

With MMOs such as Trove and Defiance already inhabiting both the PC and console space, it seems not unreasonable to wonder if Trion Worlds has any plans on growing RIFT’s audience by bringing that title to PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.

The MMO industry moves along at the speed of information, and sometimes we’re deluged with so much news here at Massively Overpowered that some of it gets backlogged. That’s why there’s The MOP Up: a weekly compilation of smaller MMO stories and videos that you won’t want to miss. Seen any good MMO news? Hit us up through our tips line!

RIFT’s anniversary event, Carnival, is now raging across the game’s live servers — but not on the new Prime progression server. While the latter does have a vendor that sells some Carnival items for void stones, the team has decided not to bring the event to Prime “in keeping with the early days of RIFT.”

But for those on the other servers, Carnival offers plenty of fun games, activities, and rewards, including the new pegasus pet Celeste, more masks, weapon runes, a raid tier 2 earring, and the 7th anniversary cape. If you are looking for a festival guilde, Rift Gate has one that’s only two years out of date. Carnival will last through April 5th.

The RIFT team is also taking a look at the latest PvP warfront to be added to the game, Tenebrean Prison. You can check it out on the live servers or by watching today’s developer livestream.

This week, The Ancient Gaming Noob posted up an image of RIFT Prime, where Trion asks people to… play nice. “Just a neighborly reminder that 1-29 chat is for RIFT chat, ideally things relevant to level 1-29 gameplay,” the UI HUD reads. “Please be good to each other. We’ve muted some and shall mute again. Have a great evening!”

Meanwhile, over in Trion’s Trove, I’ve had to report-and-block dozens of fellow players just in the last few days for disgusting slurs in multiple languages, stuff the filter doesn’t catch. For a free-to-play game that’s also on console, yeah, I guess I expect no better from the playerbase. But but but RIFT Prime is subscription-based. Surely that means a strong community, where such polite warnings from developers aren’t necessary? Yeah, not so much, as anyone who played old-school MMORPGs can tell you. This is a problem even in games whose devs prioritize community and care a whole lot.

So this week, let’s talk about in-game chat. Do you use it? Do you watch it? Do you turn it off? Is it really terrible everywhere, or just in some games? Which one is the worst and the best, and what should developers do about chat specifically?

If I were to tell you that ArcheAge’s next big update is launching next month, you’d tell me that it’s too soon. And we’d both be right! Although 4.0 was just released last December, and North America has been on a six-month cadence for getting the content after it launches in Korean, 4.5 will hit servers on April 5th. Yes, that’s 4.5 on 4/5 — easy to remember, no? Executive Producer Merv Lee Kwai explained that as XL Games is putting a renewed emphasis on the Western market, North American and the European regions get to launch an update first after Korea for the first time, instead of waiting until after Russia and China.

So what goodies do we have to look forward to before the other regions? Dubbed Legends Return, this update introduces dragon mounts, two new world bosses, a crafting commission system, and Battle Balance (a change to skillsets). There are also changes to regrading equipment and the bruisers badges. And last but not least, new fresh start servers are opening up, this time with a time-locked twist. To get a feel for all these changes, I sat down and previewed the new content with Kwai, Associate Producer Seraphina “Celestrata” Brennan, and Community Manager Joe “Muzzy” Brogno .

Over the weekend, thanks to a perfect combination of nothing pressing on my calendar for a change, an injured ankle, and crappy weather, I stayed home and basically binged on MMOs. It started out innocently; I hopped into Trove to play with my son, then I talked myself into farming to buy him a club (it’s a like a custom private island) to play around in, and within a few hours, I had devised a list of a hundred other things in the game I wanted to do and the whole family was hanging out in the living room together playing an MMO. Finally, that whole kid thing is paying off!

It’s the closest I’ve come to binging on an MMO in quite a while; usually, real life interrupts me and ruins my streak. When was the last time you binged an MMO, and what was it?

On this week’s show, Bree and Justin roll up their sleeves and take on projects left and right. It’s a look at the announcement of Project C and the imminent early access launch of Project Gorgon, among many other exciting developments this week!

It’s the Massively OP Podcast, an action-packed hour of news, tales, opinions, and gamer emails! And remember, if you’d like to send in your own letter to the show, use the “Tips” button in the top-right corner of the site to do so.

With the activation of RIFT Prime, the release of LOTRO’s Northern Mirkwood, and now this week’s launch of Project Gorgon on Steam early access, my MMO dance card is beyond full. Yet I cannot fathom ignoring Gorgon, as I’ve been waiting years for the game to get to a point where it is ready for full-fledged adventures. With this release, I think it is there.

So I will be playing with bells and whistles on, and I think Eliot might too, especially after his effusive praise of the game in his Choose My Adventure series. It’s such a quirky and fun title in the vein of Asheron’s Call that has a lot of us on staff rooting for its success.

But what about you? Now that the early access barrier has been breached, will you be trying out Project Gorgon to see if it’s worth the fuss?

So I’m playing Trove this weekend when I go into a dungeon on one of my lowbies and I realize that the mob that’s kicking my butt is a fridge. I mean that absolutely literally; the mob was a refrigerator. To attack me, it whipped open its doors and shoved out what I think is meant to be a stuffed turkey on a rack. I thought I was going slightly mad, but the Trove wiki backed me up: This is a thing, and I’ve been away from Trove long enough that I’d forgotten about them. Long live the Fridgebots!

For me, that mob is the weirdest I’ve ever tackled in a very long time playing MMOs, and this is a genre that has candy corn elementals and playable babies. What’s the wackiest MMORPG enemy group you’ve ever fought?

The MMO industry moves along at the speed of information, and sometimes we’re deluged with so much news here at Massively Overpowered that some of it gets backlogged. That’s why there’s The MOP Up: a weekly compilation of smaller MMO stories and videos that you won’t want to miss. Seen any good MMO news? Hit us up through our tips line!

Undoubtedly, our world is poorer in this post-City of Heroes era for the lack of pun-inspired superhero names that used to run, fly, and jump rampant through this game. Maybe NCsoft realized that the world as a whole was about to hit a pun shortage and pulled the plug on CoH before it could drain us of that precious resource.

In any case, BigAngry submitted this museum-quality screenshot as a reminder of the days when the name could make or break a hero: “In the waning days before the fall of City of Heroes, I took video of all my characters using their powers, so I took a screencap of the video of Soviet Summoner, who was a Demon Summoning/Trick Arrow Mastermind. Her demons, IIRC, were named after Russian cities, with the big demon named Chernobyl, of course! God I miss that game.”

The best word to describe what was happening on the launch day of RIFT Prime was “surreal.” It was absolutely surreal to see crowds of players running around in the low-level zones, and more than one person made the observation that it felt like the original launch day all over again.

I had to concur. With guilds forming left and right on the new progression server, players scrambling over each other to try to grab quest objectives, and fishing lines as far as the eye could see, it was a sight not seen in the beginning zones of RIFT since March 2011. And also as in 2011, everyone here on this progression server was paying a subscription to be a part of this new, tailored experience.

It’s a weird bird, too. RIFT Prime isn’t exactly vanilla, but it does offer a way to go back to the core game without some of the “fast lane” features (like instant adventures) to zip up through the levels. It strips all players of their extra starting bonuses, save for the special cash shop packs that kind of ruined this pristine level starting field.

It was a good, strong start, at least as far as my limited observations perceived, but what was playing RIFT Prime really like? After a couple of days on this new server ruleset, I have a few thoughts about both the good and bad of RIFT’s stab at a progression shard.